Re: [h-e-w] Windows 10 Taskbar Behavior

[Rob Davenport]

 

>The only things that addpm.exe adds to App Paths are:

>- an entry for emacs.exe, with a suitable Path (so it can be run from almost anywhere)

 

That seems fine.  Though it might be useful to include runemacs.exe and emacsclient[w].exe as well.

 

> - The path for the Gtk DLLs (which it adds to the Path vaule), if installed. This functionality was removed from the Emacs trunk a few days ago.

 

OK – then that’s nothing to worry about.  I just cloned the source from the git repo yesterday and I see it was removed, so it’ll be gone from my version too.

 

 

>Well, it has a few other uses, but not many: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee872121(v=vs.85).aspx

 

Interesting.  Those are some things I didn’t know about.  Could be moderately useful *if* we wanted non-default drop target behavior, or passing a URL instead of the shell downloading the document and using a local copy.

 

 

> If you're running the 32-bit addpm in a 32-bit Windows, it does just that, and if you run the 32-bit addpm in a 64-bit Windows, it adds it to HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\GNU\Emacs.

 

Now I see that addpm only *updates* those registry values (EMACSLOADPATH, emacs_dir, EMACSPATH, EMACSDATA, EMACSDOC, SHELL and TERM) – they must already exist.

So at least running addpm on machines that have never had those keys will not get them added.  I tested that and that’s how it worked for me.    I’ll go ahead and anticipate Eli’s response: if modern Emacs doesn’t use those values (or doesn’t need to) then that shouldn’t be part of addpm.  Correct? J

 

(And there must be both HLKM\Software\[Wow6432Node\]GNU\Emacs and HKCU\Software\[Wow6432Node\]GNU\Emacs keys for it to even attempt to update them.  So unless someone has added both those keys previously, addpm won’t try to update the other entries which makes it less likely to me that that code will do anything.) 

 

Also addpm.exe must be run elevated so it has permission to access those keys. That threw me for a minute.

 

It seems the only useful features of addpm are:

-          Adding emacs.exe entry to AppPaths key.

-          Add a shortcut to the Windows common or user Start Menu folder

 

The other registry values I don’t think are needed, and using the ancient DDE method for adding shortcuts for Windows 3.1 (and maybe Win95/NT4) I think could be removed.   I can see upholding the ideal of retaining support for older operating systems but this might be extreme for Windows.

 

 

Ø  That's great. Holler if you need me to try it on my Windows 10 Home.

 

Thanks – I probably will when I get it working.   More testing the better.

 

Rob